Revolution was making warfare more expensive, and reducing the number of states that
were militarily viable at any given time.
This mercantilist system was swept away in the early 19th century as a result of
technological and geopolitical change. Paradoxically, the beginning of the end occurred
in North America, partly at least as a result of British successes there. As a number of
observers predicted following the end of the Seven Years War, without a French presence
threatening the British colonists there, those colonists would now find it easier to press
for independence from the mother country. The fiscal crisis which the conflict gave rise
to provided one trigger for the American Revolution, which ended with the Peace of Paris
in 1783. French involvement was crucial for the rebellion's success, but this in turn led to
a fiscal crisis in France which again was one of the triggers leading to revolution there.
When war between Britain and France broke out yet again in 1793, it now had an
additional ideological dimension adding to the severity and duration of the conflict,
which only finally ended with the French defeat at Waterloo in 1815. By that time,
Napoleon's invasion of Iberia in 1807 had been followed by a series of revolutions in
Latin America, and by the 1820s independent republics (or an empire in the case of
Brazil), had been established across the continent. Apart from Spanish Cuba and Puerto
Rico, and British Canada, virtually nothing remained of Europe's New World empires.
While these newly independent nations adopted highly protectionist policies during the
19th century, those tariffs would be imposed in the context of a broadly multilateral
international trading system, in which there were no more bilateral mercantilist
restrictions on trade.
Several other factors promoted globalisation between 1815 and 1870. The post-
war settlement, ushered in by the Congress of Vienna, led to a remarkably durable peace
in Europe. Despite the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian war, and a number of smaller
conflicts, and despite the fact that the period ended with the disaster of the Great War, the
century after Waterloo was a peaceful one by European standards. The new transport
technologies of the Industrial Revolution, described in Chapter 1.8, dramatically reduced
transport costs. Geopolitically, new industrial military technologies increased the relative
power of Europe and her most important overseas offshoot, the United States. The half-
century following Waterloo saw major European imperial advances in India, North